Verba: Lewis and Short for Mac
Is Perseus too slow? Poor/no internet connection? Wish you could carry your huge Lewis and Short around everywhere your computer can go? Tired of those tiny glosses that WORDS provides?
Announcing Verba, a simple interface to A Latin Dictionary, by Lewis and Short. I’ve often been in class and wished that I could look up the full definition to a word, but not had internet access at the time. My only two recourses until now were WORDS (a fine program if you need parsing help, but the definitions can be lacking) or Diogenes (a fantastic program for PHI and TLG texts as well as for the LS and LSJ, but a bit slow and bulky on my computer). Finally, however, I have taken a little initiative to solve my dilemma. My coding skills (especially for Mac) are very rudimentary, yet enough to create this simply program for browsing Lewis and Short.
Verba is designed to do just that, viz., lookup words in LS, and nothing more (this is not and will never be a parser). It is lightweight and fast. I sincerely hope that it will be of some use for those who would also like blazing-speed access to this time-tested resource.
The download is fairly small (~12MB), but when extracted will require around 90MB of disk space due to the size of the dictionary.
bonam lectiōnem!
Tu es ille vir! (You’re the man!)
I have been looking for something faster than Perseus but more reliable than Words for some three years now. This is splendid; I’m amazed that I had never heard of it before. You should really post it on MacUpdate.
My one suggestion would be to change the interface a bit to be more consistent with the Dictionary application. Particularly, you could clean things up quite a bit by using a unified toolbar, replacing the “Lookup” button with a search field, and using icons for the Next/Previous buttons.
It would be fantastic if Command+right/left arrow key (or square brackets, as in Finder and Safari) would have the same effect as pressing the buttons, while keeping the focus on the search field. This way, the entire application could be controlled via the keyboard.
Magnas gratias ago!
Thank you for the suggestions. I have wanted to make some changes, but I just lack time right now. Whenever I do get around to updating I will certainly incorporate the suggestions you have made.
I’ll look into putting on MacUpdate.
Thanks a lot. Gratias plurimas ago tibi.
I have been working hard to prepare a tagged module of the Vulgate for use within Accordance, and I often had to browse LS online, and wait and wait for the page to load.
Verba would have saved me a lot of time.
As I am still working on the module VULG-T to refine it, Verba came as a bonus.
Vale atque etiam vale.